Traces
What if humans also have something like a bulk modulus? Some quality that determines how much emotional or cognitive pressure we can withstand before our state fundamentally changes?
In moments of pressure - when external demands exceed our current trace, our current capacity - we undergo a state change. But here's the crucial difference between humans and materials: we can influence our own bulk modulus. Unlike diamond or steel, we can choose - through awareness, practice, intention - how deeply we resist pressure, how we meet it, so that it transforms us without destroying us.
Installation
The goal / project questions
In this project I research how paintings can contain collective memory of lived identity experience. Paintings become narrative objects that translate stories through color meanings and textured scars created by laser burning and regeneration with layered colors on top. I ask myself how people feel these next chapters of life. Would the artwork provoke hope and sharing, or pause viewers in the exact moment of the painting itself. How would a collectively written canvas look when viewers are invited to reflect on the statement of emotional pressure.
Project set-up
1. Six painted canvases with laser burned patterns and their restoration through coloring on top.
2. White Canvas
3. Air pressure sensors connected to white canvases, designed to read only pressure when the canvas is touched.
4. Audio dataset with pre recorded sounds from daily life that can provoke collective memory, such as church bell, sirens, kids laughing, breathing out.
5. LED panels around the white canvases emit colors depending on the amount of pressure.
Works to see - will be available from the end of April
Related works
External
Research Method
Observations derived from structural physics, particularly material tension and bulk modulus measurement, combined with field research.
Medium
Oil on canvas; acrylic on canvas
Artist Translation
These works explore identity formation in moments when an unknown external stimulus provokes an ambiguous emotional response. This suspended state leaves a subtle trace: an intuitive sensation of internal pressure that the observer can hold before biochemical processes initiate behavioral patterns. The painting examines this threshold state, where identity is shaped not by the reaction itself, but by the tension accumulated just before it and initiates the project Traces.
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Research Method
Field studies; structural physics; interviews; application of pressure sensors and arduino
Medium
Oil on canvas
Artist Translation
This work continues the investigation of pressure initiated in the project Traces: identity formation in moments when an unknown external stimulus provokes an ambiguous emotional response. Through the process of destruction of a previous form, a new figure emerges. This new form carries a history within its material structure, yet it no longer preserves the original context and collective memory is absent.
